Very few influencers and decision makers buy colocation services on a whim. Engaging the services of a colo data center is almost always a very research-intensive, considered sales process that can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months – even years, depending on scope.
To get a handle on your sales funnel, you will most certainly need to understand your various deal stages and average sales cycle length.
But given all of this, there are some very specific steps that your colo data center can take to accelerate its revenue – so sales close faster.
We talked about this very issue during the recent Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers. An excerpt from this on-demand webinar recording follows below in this post.
How Can We Accelerate Our Data Center Revenue?
It’s important to be mindful of where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. And then feed those prospects content that’s appropriate for where they are in the buyer’s journey.
For example, when you look at the marketing automation platform that people use to track all of this – and you look at the lead intelligence – you‘ll begin to notice some tell-tale signs.
Colo Data Centers Can Gauge Intent by the Purpose of the Pages Viewed
Someone that’s poking around your pricing page is either
- a competitor of yours and just spying – and you should’ve been able to knock them out very early on in the qualification process, with how you segmented those leads when you captured basic form data, or
- pretty late stage and indicating that they’re more than likely ready for a sales conversation -- assuming that person is a marketing qualified lead – for example, in the right geographic area and the right size
If a prospect is looking at your “contact us” page, more than likely that prospect is thinking about contacting your company. So it’s not going to be totally out of the blue for you to contact that prospect.
If a prospect is looking at your management page, your “about us” page, or your bios, it’s showing similar kind of intent in the later parts, the decision stage, of the buyer’s journey.
Big picture – there are certain pages on your website that almost always indicate late-stage intent.
If a prospect is looking at your services pages, again this is late-stage intent.
Caution for Early Stage Intent (Awareness Stage of the Buyer’s Journey) – and the Value of Nurturing
However, and this is a big however, if a prospect is reading your educational blog posts and downloading your educational white papers that are designed for people that are early on in the buyer’s journey, that prospect may not be ready for a sales conversation quite yet.
And nurturing that prospect by email and by social media – even using nurturing through a webinar like this – can be very, very helpful for identifying the people that are most ready to raise their hands and ready to engage at the late-stage. And that helps to accelerate your revenue in a very powerful way.
Real Time Website Revisit Notifications
Another big technology that’s become a lot more useful in recent years is real time notifications.
When someone that is a lead on your website revisits your website, you should have software that is able to notify your sales professionals in real-time that one of their leads is back on your website. And it can tell your sales team specifically what kinds of content that lead is engaging with.
As long as you don’t go overboard into the creepy territory, just being able to reach out and say, “Hey Bob. It’s been a while since we touched base. Just wanted to reach out and see if you’re still working on that project we discussed last month on the 5th. Give me a shout if you need any help. My number is...”
So that can make an enormous difference for accelerating revenue.
What steps does your colo data center currently take to accelerate its revenue and close sales faster? Share your favorite tip in the Comments below.
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